WELLS IN DEPTH –  Tristan Gray Hulse

In any contemporary assessment of Jones’ discussions of the various elements of the Welsh well cult, the principal tendentious component of his thesis must be his overall, though not total, and certainly not unquestioning, acceptance of the theory of what may be termed ‘survivalism’ – that is, that some, and perhaps many, elements of the well cult which appear to be at variance with the culture within which the earliest records of the cultus of any particular holy well appears, are to be evaluated as the survivals of such elements from an earlier religious system. Thus, any examples which appear to show parallel cultic usages (in the widest sense) between pagan and Christian religious systems, or which seem on the face of it alien to what is widely, if often uncritically, perceived as ‘Christian’ practice, are best understood as survivals of pagan religious praxis into Christian times, either because Christianity tried but failed to eradicate them, or because Christianity deliberately chose to incorporate such elements into its own praxis, in an effort to win over converts by ‘christianising’ the older faith (in Jones, as in so many other writers still today, both interpretations are used, as seems best to fit the evidence in each individual instance, without, apparently, any awareness of a basic mutual antagonism between the two suggested ways in which ‘survival’ is said to occur). Any such interpretation is ultimately based upon a naive adoption of a Darwinian evolutionary model, most particularly – dealing as it does with things religious – as this was mediated and exploited wholesale by Frazer; a specious solution of the problems posed by parallel cultural and religious phenomena which has proved particularly tenacious, in holy wells and related studies (particularly, perhaps, by virtue of its convenience, and latterly, dare one suggest, because it appears to offer scholarly support for the purely private religious and/or philosophical convictions of numbers of would-be scholars or prophets), despite the fact that in all other disciplines specialists have long rejected the doctrinaire Darwinian-Frazerian model. In the wider fields of scholarship, such older models have been discarded; but in the intensive arenas of such specialities as holy well studies, these earlier simplistic modes of interpretation have survived intact. Jones, as an honest but unwitting inheritor of this earlier model, and without any subsequent relevant interpretation of the data which he was presenting being available, is still being cited as an authority for ideas which in other disciplines were rejected decades ago.

Having said this, I would here wish to make it clear that I do not reject out of hand the idea that in certain instances sacred sites and elements of their associated cults may have survived from a pre-Christian past. But the evidence for such survival, to be convincing, has to be clear and unambiguous. For instance, here in Wales almost any element of the well cult which at first glance appears to be clearly ‘pagan’ can be paralleled elsewhere in the Early Christian world, in a fully-articulated cult of the saints, at a period anterior to the conversion of the country to the new faith – and this includes a thriving cult of sacred water sources. This cultus was received into Wales already fully formed. To argue otherwise, in general or in specific instances, demands archaeological, epigraphic, or historical witness; and in the case of the holy wells of Wales, I know of no single instance in which a shred of any such evidence is forthcoming.

However, what follows here is in no sense an attempt to rectify such problems as these are encountered in The Holy Wells of Wales. Many researchers over the past few decades have been initially tempted – even if they have never done anything at all about it – to bring Jones’ great book ‘up-to-date’: mostly (and I write as one once regularly so tempted!) to supply Jones’ omissions, to amplify his already abundant references, and incidentally to rectify his interpretations of aspects of the well cult in Wales in the light of more recent and sounder scholarship. Like the rest of the would-be rectifiers of this seminal text, I eventually came to the conclusion that the only honest and profitable way to proceed would have been to rewrite the whole work – and like everyone else I know who has ever considered such a course, I have jibbed at the sheer scale of such a proposed reworking.

Having outlined what seem to me to be the principal problems to be encountered in using The Holy Wells of Wales today, it remains for me to add that the present paper is no more than a presentation of the documentation available for the eventual compilation of a tentative outline history of a single North Welsh holy well, using this small dossier to suggest the difficulties of offering any conclusive account of this well, its history, and its cultus (and it is worth considering, in this context, that this particular well is one of the best-documented of all Welsh holy wells), and, by extension, of virtually all Welsh holy wells; at the same time time, by noting what use Francis Jones made of such informations, and by indicating such errors of fact and interpretation which inadvertently occur in his text, I suggest that, for the future, Major Jones’ great work must be appreciated as tentative and exploratory, rather than as definitive. Jones’ gathering of relevant texts will always remain invaluable to the student, but all his conclusions on the well cult in Wales must be evaluated anew. My own indebtedness to Francis Jones’ work is incalculable, and in offering this caveat I intend no more (or less) than to help towards a proper awareness of its considerable limitations, as the best way of preserving its integrity, and its usefulness, for the future.